As with the tariff, so with pensions; the Congressman is urged to obtain local favors without regard to National interests.

As regards these people, all that can be done is to create a vigorous public opinion—an opinion which shall not only make it uncomfortable for any man to demand such favors, but which shall cordially support the Congressman in refusing…

It is futile to expect to cure this type of evil merely by solemnly saying that each Congressman ought to be good.

On the other hand, it is just as idle for Congressmen to seek to excuse themselves as a body by uttering jeremiads as to the improper way in which their constituents press them to do things that ought not to be done.

The individual Congressman can be excused only by frankly admitting that the fault lies with the Congressmen taken collectively.

Congress has now, and has long had, the power to rid its members of almost all the improper pressure brought to bear upon the individual by special interests—great and small, local and metropolitan—on such subjects as tariff legislation…

Congress has not exercised this power, chiefly because of what I am bound to regard as a very shortsighted and unwise belief that it is beneath its dignity to delegate any of its functions.

These men, from the very nature of the case, will be wholly free from the local pressure of special interests so keenly felt by every man who is dependent upon the vote of a particular district every two years for his continuance in public…

Such a commission could work in harmony with the Commissioner of Labor, so as to insure that the laborers for whom the tariff is passed get the full benefit of it; for the major part of the benefit of a protective tariff should…

Even under such conditions of tariff-making errors might be committed, but they would be merely those errors of disinterested judgment incidental to every kind of public or, for the matter of that, private effort, and the work would not be…

It is only in this way that tariff legislation, river and harbor legislation, and pension legislation can be treated from the standpoint of principle and not from the very low standpoint of privilege and preference.

As soon as business becomes at all complex—and nothing can be more complex than the business of a Nation of a hundred million people—it can only be performed by delegating to experts the duty of dealing with all that can properly be…

It is only by such delegation that it is possible to secure the proper consideration of the exceedingly important business which cannot properly be delegated.

The voters, as a whole, for instance, must necessarily declare directly upon all really vital issues, and they should do this when the issue is a man just as much as when the issue is one of legislation.

Indeed, in my judgment, there are certain matters, as to which the voters do not at present have the chance of thus acting directly, where it is important that the chance be given them.

What is true of the voters is equally true of legislators and administrators the moment that their tasks become sufficiently complex.

But the President of the United States can do his work at all only by delegating the enormous mass of it to his appointees, and by confining his own share of the purely administrative work largely to supervision and direction of these…

Now, Congress can with wisdom act in such matters of prime legislative importance as the tariff and river and harbor improvement, in the same way that the President acts in such matters of prime administrative importance as country life…

There are no two public questions of more vital importance to the future of this country than the problem of Conservation and the problem of the betterment of country life.

All our industrial and commercial welfare, all our material development of every kind, depends in the last resort upon our preserving and increasing the fertility of the soil.

In the same way it is essential for the farmers themselves to try to broaden the life of the man who lives in the open country; to make it more attractive; to give it every adjunct and aid to development which has been given to the life of…

Therefore the conservation and rural life policies are really two sides of the same policy; and down at bottom this policy rests upon the fundamental law that neither man nor nation can prosper unless, in dealing with the present, thought…

Up to a certain point the city movement is thoroughly healthy; yet it is a strange and lamentable fact that always hitherto after this point has been reached the city has tended to develop at the expense of the country by draining the…

In consequence, in the past, every civilization in its later stages has tended really to witness those conditions under which “the cities prosper and the men decay.” There are ugly signs that these tendencies are at work in this nation of…

But very fortunately we see now what never before was seen in any civilization—an aroused and alert public interest in the problem, a recognition of its gravity and a desire to attempt its solution.